Troperiffic

You know you want to watch it!
"Yor is both everything and nothing that movies have ever been. It rips off so many cinematic cliches that it actually passes infinity, curves back around and then comes back to become something wholly original again! It is, in a word, transcendent.

While some works love Playing with a Trope and others are so lacking in self-awareness that they play everything painfully straight, there are some gems that take delight in their tropes and then turn them Up to Eleven. This is especially common in Reconstructions, where all the narrative conventions that made the genre fun are present in full (and generally goofy) force, or parody works, usually of the affectionate variety, where the whole point is to laugh at as many tropes as humanly possible.

So, the grizzled veteran will jump on a grenade. The Kid Hero will find that last bit of Heroic Willpower to fight off The Virus and vanquish the newly freed Big Bad once and for all. The seven Runes of Borax will be gathered when the planets are aligned to free the Ultimate Evil who will inevitably turn on the evil overlord.

In short, works that are deemed Troperiffic apologize for absolutely nothing and just have fun with every convention or tried idea and taking it to places never thought possible. MST3K Mantra will be sometimes be a requirement to enjoy the work, because without it, Troperiffic works can come off as confusing. Then again, a good Troperiffic work will be fairly obvious about it in some way.

Note that one person's Troperiffic is another person's Cliché Storm, although most Troperiffic works have a certain level of Lampshade Hanging, sarcasm, or underlying love for the genre the work exists in. That, and Rule of Cool in copious amounts.

Compare Serial Escalation, Exaggerated Trope. A work that is verifiably like this can be said to be Trope Overdosed.

Examples of Troperiffic include:

Anime & Manga

"This show gets a free pass for being the most wish-fulfilling sci-fi title ever. Everything you can love about sci-fi is here: space races, space combat, diverse planets, alternate dimensions, weird aliens, hot aliens, aliens of questionable gender(seriously, what is that?), giant robots, bio-androids, human cyborgs, cold-sleep beauties, shapeshifting beastmen, laser-gun fights, sword fights, fistfights, paintball, Mad Scientists, Tao magicians, robotic panthers, kung-fu housecats, and a Hot Springs Episode that is actually funny.


Comedy

  • Steve Byrne goes over all of the Race Tropes and Acceptable Targets in this routine from his special The Byrne Identity.


Comic Books

  • Astro City is extremely casual about things like, say, Earth being the only portal between the realms of the warring Frigions and Thermeons. Even their names are troperiffic.
  • Gold Digger takes tropes from a half-dozen genres, superheroes, SF, fantasy, martial arts flicks, Indiana Jones-style adventure movies, and mixes them all together.
  • Invincible seems to flip back and forth between this and Subversion of the superhero genre.
  • PS238 takes every last superhero-related trope in existence (and a few unrelated, just for good measure), deconstructs them, reconstructs them, plays them straight (though rarely) and averts them. Next thing you know, they're dancing on the tables, wearing lampshades and chugging Frothy Mugs of Water. And it does it all while taking place in a public school.
  • Top 10 takes the Astro City concept to an absurdist extreme with a city literally populated by nothing but superheroes, allowing for every trope of the genre to develop and take center stage.
  • Nextwave. To borrow from Word of God:

It’s an absolute distillation of the superhero genre. No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It’s people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. -- Warren Ellis


Fan Works

Films -- Animation

  • Red Line is possibly the most troperiffic racing movie ever, rivaled only by Speed Racer, and with even more insanity and more explosions, and it will explode with its color and art style into your retinas forever.
  • The Princess and the Frog mixes all the best parts of the Disney Animated Canon in a bowl, adds a few twists for extra spice, then deep-fries it like a beignet.
  • Megamind advertised itself saying "The superhero movie will never be the same again." Granted, it was the same, but only for the first fifteen minutes or so... and then we have some lovely plot twists that kind of turn a parody of Superman into its own engaging story. Whether or not you like this film, you probably have to admit that the people working on this movie REALLY knew their Superhero Tropes well; just look at Megamind's Character Development and you'll get what I mean.


Films -- Live-Action

How, for example, does [Bekmambetov] make a cup of coffee? My best guess, based on the evidence of the film, is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins to collect the precious percolated drops. Don't even think about a cappuccino.


Literature

  • Every Simon R. Green series ever. The characters are literally walking tropes, complete with their catchphrase and taglines which they often introduce themselves or others with. Jon Taylor, in particular, often tells people, "It's Jon Taylor and Suzie Shotgun, otherwise known as "Oh God it's her, run!""
  • The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander, are gleefully full of Older Than Print tropes from Welsh myth. And they're still awesome. Although he does take a few liberties for purposes of fiction—for instance, converting Arawn to an Evil Dark Lord.
  • John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory, where all the characters have Medium Awareness that they are in a Fairy Tale, so that tropes are invoked, lampshaded, and even relied on—but not excessively, since they don't know for certain what their roles are.
  • David Eddings' Belgariad. An intensely derivative work treading over ground walked by fantasy novels since time immemorial and still managing to be an enjoyable read. And his Elenium uses a lot of the same tropes as The Belgariad, but is often considered by fans to be even better. It's after that that things start getting dodgy...
  • Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible gleefully describes a street-leveling superbattle involving a world-threatening Mad Scientist with tons of tricks up his sleeves facing down a normal human with an animal on the chest of his uniform, a lightning-summoning fairy, a bipedal tiger, and a flying invulnerable woman, started when the Mad Scientist was just trying to drink some coffee. Almost perfectly invincible flying man with heat-beam eyes saves a lovely reporter from constant kidnapping by a villain intimately tied into his past, dies and has a massive funeral, or rather, fakes it for a very short time, and always saves the world. The bad guy defeats the good guys and ties them up in Death Traps. Famous heroes sacrifice themselves to save the planet from warring aliens, while villains never die and always escape, or go to Cardboard Prison. No one finds these events strange or unbelievable. Very shocking in a book where said Mad Scientist wonders why he doesn't find a career that'd make money rather than involve him being beaten up by powered heroes, and the bipedal tiger is known to have back problems.
  • John Moore's Heroics for Beginners is a send up of all the swashbuckling and RPG clichés that ever were. In fact, the whole premise of the novel is about a Prince who goes off to fight the Big Bad to win the hand of the Princess with the help of "The Handbook of Practical Heroics" (which is essentially a user's guide to Genre Savvy). The Evil Overlord, He Who Must Be Named, makes it disturbingly obvious that the writer has read the Evil Overlord List. His ventilation ducts ARE too small to crawl through. From the back cover:
When a seemingly crazy, poorly dressed soothsayer tells you not to let a magical talisman fall into the wrong hands, take him or her seriously. DO NOT laugh it off and leave said talisman simply lying around on a side table; you might as well just end the world yourself.


Live-Action TV

  • The A-Team. Part of the appeal is knowing, blow by blow, how each episode will play out before you watch it. There will be a scene where B.A. throws a guy over a car. Murdock will act silly and tick B.A. off. Face will fall in love with every remotely attractive woman he sees. It's just fun. And lots of machine guns will get fired, but no one will get shot. The Big Bad's car will ramp off another vehicle, fly twisting sideways over a ground camera, and crash on its roof. The Big Bad and his Mooks will crawl out, uninjured, and surrender. The basic formula stays the same, but the writers switch up the specifics. Take Murdock, for instance: he'll act crazy, of course, but how? Will he decide he's a cab-driving superhero? Pretend he's Captain Ahab? Act like an artsy filmmaker? Psychoanalyze a bunch of pecans while switching between a German accent and just plain German? ...And yeah, he did all of those things.
  • Chuck seems to tend towards this, with many tropes played straight, though often for laughs. It's predictable, but humorously so (often dialed Up to Eleven). Someone sets a trip wire to stop Thanksgiving thieves at the Buy More? A bad guy will trip over it before the end of the episode.
  • Burn Notice embraces a wide variety of tropes and proceeds to use, subvert, deconstruct, avert, and in general play with all of them. Sometimes the show follows a pretty clean formula for the individual stories, and unfortunately that is its main flaw. But in the narration there is more than a dozen quotes you could use to describe an individual trope that are so specific you know they did it on purpose.
  • Power Rangers RPM is wonderfully aware of inherent unavoidable silliness of Power Rangers, healthily lampshades it, reconstructs it, and still manages to crank it Up to Eleven. Want proof? Head on over to the entry for the series at your own peril.
  • Human Target takes action move tropes and dials them Up to Eleven resulting in one of the most awesome action shows on TV.
  • Glee, in that it relies heavily on plot clichés and a very large amount of character tropes. It's quite predictable, but never completely in the way you'd expect.
  • iCarly and it's use of various Kid Com staples.
  • The Adventures of Brisco County Jr unashamedly plays with every trope in the book in pursuit of the Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny. Even Dead Horse Tropes.
  • Community. Abed is a troper. He invokes tropes.
  • Supernatural invokes all the Did We Just X Cthulhu tropes.
  • Remote Control, the MTV TV trivia Game Show that revolved around a TV junkie-turned-game-show-host and parodied just about every game show in existence and then some, naturally played with as many Tropes as it could get its hands on.
  • Doctor Who is a show about a time travelling alien that fights other aliens in different times. It has used every science-fiction trope in the books, and even named some of them. Notable that in its nearly 50 year run, its not only used most sci-fi tropes, but also ones belonging to fantasy, historical fiction, horror and comedy. And that's not even touching on things like character tropes.
  • Degrassi. Just look at its page. It's basically explored every possible angle of the Teen Drama, not to mention being the successor of the shows that created the genre in the first place, and is now a certified Long Runner.
  • Everybody Hates Chris did this with Race Tropes.


Music


Tabletop Games

Don't be afraid to steal ideas from books, movies, and other sources for your personal use. The DM's job is to entertain, not to be original.

  • What Warhammer 40,000 does with sci-fi, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay does with fantasy. Okay, maybe it's not quite as whacked-out, but it's still a pretty awesome mish-mash of every fantasy trope you could care to name. One example is The Empire: A Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Holy Roman Empire led by a particularly awesome Emperor (who runs around with either the Reikland Runefang or Sigmar's own warhammer, and rides either a dragon or a griffin).
  • "Exalted is a game where one of your main antagonists is Death, Creator of the Underworld. Except there's several of him, probably six or seven. Oh, and he's got 13 dread henchmen, one of whom was probably you at some point in time. Also, Hell has a personal grudge against you this time. Did I mention Magical America regularly trains and sends ninjas out for you personally? Ninjas specially trained in *** -kicking? Which, if they won't work, they keep giant robotic suits of armor on reserve for. Oh, and the Transformers have united under Omicron, and are invading. The Jedi have corrupted Heaven and usurped your rightful place as the Masters of Everything. Your ex-wife just dropped by, and she's a two thousand year old shape-changing man-eating monster now, interested in maybe going on a date next Thursday. Your best friend from your last life and while growing up now seeks to cover all the lands of Middle Earth in darkness, if he can just find this damn ring. And your God has the world's biggest crack habit, and needs some serious rehab." -- Darius Solluman
  • Genius: The Transgression, a fan-made line of the New World of Darkness, is filled to the brim with science-fiction tropes and treats the Applied Phlebotinum tropes as blueprints.
  • Grave Robbers From Outer Space, a card game about making low-budget genre movies that both mocks and glorifies the numerous cliches and archetypes of a variety of genres.
  • GURPS Cliffhangers: The GM is urged to avoid subtlety and use every pulp fiction cliche he can think of because a game based on pulp fiction should have cliches.
  • Cleopatra's Caboose, a tongue-in-cheek European-style board game that throws in just about every cliched Euro-game theme or mechanic the designer could think of: trains, ancient Egypt, bidding, building, special powers, resource management, limited actions...
  • Strike Legion is so derivative it digs right out the bottom of Cliché Storm and becomes this. A MST.
  • Tabletop Game/Monsterpocalypse uses every trope used in a Kaiju setting.


Toys


Video Games


Visual Novels


Web Comics

  • If individual characters can be Troperiffic, Antihero for Hire's Dr. Nefarious is.
  • In-story example: In Gunnerkrigg Court, Dr. Disaster's holo-simulator plugs its users into a story straight out of 1950s pulp sci-fi: Latex Spacesuits, Death Rays, and alien moon fortresses are played gleefully straight. Antimony is the only one who has any problem accepting this, and even she eventually lightens up and has a great time.
  • Chris Hastings once wrote down every single '80s action movie trope that he could remember. Then he crammed ever one of them into a story. The result was The Adventures of Dr. McNinja Story Arc "D.A.R.E. to Resist Ninja Drugs and Violence".
  • No Rest for The Wicked: How many fairy tales can you stick into a single webcomics? Quite a few, actually.
  • Terinu combines old school YA science fiction coming of age, super powers, space pirates, a galaxy wide war story, cyberpunk style net hacking... WITH FURRIES!
  • Adventurers! skewers basically every RPG trope in the entire TV Tropes Wiki.
  • The Order of the Stick is determined to have an example on every page here. Even mutually exclusive ones. Especially mutually exclusive ones!
  • And Girl Genius is another Trope-alicious example.
  • Problem Sleuth, like Adventurers!, goes out of its way to use, lampshade, avert, subvert, invert, and pay homage to nearly every single RPG and Adventure game trope out there, culminating in one of the most gloriously surreal Final Boss battles ever, as all the tropes collapse in on themselves like some giant Post-Modernist singularity.
  • Homestuck, the MS Paint Adventures currently in progress, does the same thing for simulation games, fantasy, and sci-fi that Problem Sleuth did for adventure games, noir, and Anime-style action. Many time travel tropes, a jillion different kinds of Applied Phlebotinum, video game themed Techno Babble, characters with increasingly bizarre traits, and a great big heaping of Tropes of Legend all mix together with a great soundtrack and whimsical art style into the one of the most Troperiffic things in existence. The main work page itself became so long that the tropes listed had to be put into folders! In fact, Homestuck as well as other hugely Troperiffic franchises are in part responsible for some of the recent server crashes. They have so many tropes they are crashing the site.
  • Even though The Dreamer only has 10 issues so far, it is particularly trope-filled.


Web Original

Western Animation


Real Life

  1. You can guess why it's twelve but not eleven.
  2. though the latter isn't bad as much as not applicable
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